Russian death crash pilot was drunk

Gold Member

I missed this at the time, but the article makes for sobering reading.

"One passenger sent a text message to a friend in Britain shortly before take-off, saying: "The voice of our captain - he sounds like a completely drunk man."

A report in Russian newspaper Komsomolskaya Pravda said: "The general impression of this report is that somebody put two drunk and sleepy tractor-drivers into the cabin of an plane and later they had to land it somehow."

The plane's black box tape recorded the chaos on the flight deck as the crew struggled to fly the plane after switching off the auto-pilot.As the pilots prepared to land, one was trying to turn the plane left, the other right.

Investigators said they did not know how to operate the horizon indicator. The second pilot was heard shouting: "Do it for me please, do it!" and the captain shouted back: "I can't do it either", while the co-pilot desperately asked: "What are we doing?"